At Likewise, we’re celebrating 10 years of Active Directory.  Active Directory was officially released on February 17th, 2000, along with Windows 2000 Server edition.  A lot has changed in the past ten years.

We would like to share where we were 10 years ago.  Several Likewise employees contributed to this post below.  And, for readers who wish to contribute, the five best responses will get Likewise t-shirts!

First of all, Manny Vellon, CTO of Likewise:

Manny Vellon

Manny Vellon

It’s hard to believe that Windows Server and Active Directory are only 10 years old. I think that, maybe, I’ve subconsciously decided to forget about the bad old days and simply pretend that AD has been around forever.

I was at Microsoft during the late 80’s and much of the 90’s. My first exposure to networks was through Microsoft/IBM “LAN Manager” and I still remember my MS-DOS based system beeping  interminably when something caused the network to inexplicably stop working. Sharing files and printers over the network was a great improvement over Sneakernet but still required the management of a myriad of passwords when connecting to different devices.

Microsoft NT and its concept of “Domains” was an improvement – now files and printers could be protected with domain-wide ACLs instead of individual passwords. We struggled, however, with flaky domain controllers and size limitations. I experienced the arrival of Windows 2000 and Active Directory in early forms just before leaving Microsoft. It was great to see a true LDAP based directory and the adoption of Kerberos as an improvement over the weaker NTLM security employed by NT.

10 years later, Active Directory is a strong as ever. Not only is it in 95%+ of Fortune 1000 companies, it’s in my house, too! Having gotten tired of running unreliable “share-level” security on my printers and backup servers, I installed AD at home about 5 years ago. Now, my family’s 6 Windows computers all use it for authentication. I also make use of our own product, Likewise Enterprise, to join my two Linux machines to AD, as well.

It will be interesting to see whether AD survives the next sea change: the transition to public, cloud-based, computing. In general, AD has not had as much success outside the firewall as within it. In the meantime, however, AD will continue to dominate in the Enterprise and in hybrid clouds.

Thanks Manny!  Now, here are some more memories from members of the Likewise team…  “Where were you 10 years ago?”

“10 years ago I worked for a company which had several products based on its own multi-platform implementation of Kerberos.  I was on the toolkit team and I remember doing interoperability testing with Active Directory.  I’ve been working on Active Directory integration with non-Windows platforms ever since.”
– Arlene B.

“Ten years I ago, it’s kind of foggy, but I think I was partying like it was 1999!”
– Steve Y.

“I shipped Windows 2000 as a developer in the Distributed System division (the team that built Active Directory). Window 2000 was a huge project which took 4 years to release. Active Directory was built from the Directory components of Microsoft Exchange 4.0., a project that I also worked on. Many of the key developers from the Exchange DSA team moved to the Windows division to evolve the directory to AD. Here it moved from being a X-500 email directory to all the features that AD provides. It was great to be an integral part of this effort and to work side-by-side with such brilliant team of engineers.”
– Glenn C.

“I was selling Unified Communications and Fax Server software with Captaris (CAPA) in the ‘hay day’ of Y2K…  Ahh, I often dream of the days where $100k booking days were the norm.  Since we were highly leveraging the email message store (Exchange or Lotus Notes at the time) my company was the first to leverage Active Directory for user account management which ended up being a huge differentiator for us.”
– Jeff H.

“I was hacking but still unable to drive.”
– Yvo V.

“I had just helped start a new company and was traveling the world deploying Microsoft’s Commercial Internet System and early adoption of Active Directory.”
– Mike S.

“Ten years ago I was deep in the Linux community, selling advertising for Linux Journal, making the rounds of trade shows big and small: LinuxWorld in San Francisco and New York, CeBit in Hannover, Germany, LISA, USENIX, LUGs, etc.  I rubbed elbows with Linux gurus such as Doc Searles, John “Maddog” Hall and Don Marti; I even saw Linus himself strolling through LinuxWorld in San Francisco in 2001.  I fell into the job quite by accident: the publishers and staff of Linux Journal ate lunch every day at the Cajun restaurant in Seattle where I waited tables while working on my Master’s Degree.  They needed a sales rep and I needed a steady job.  That was my indoctrination into Linux and Open Source, and ever since I’ve been evangelizing about it to anyone who will listen.”
– Gretchen C.

“Ten years ago I was in college…partying some, but studying more, and getting involved as much as I could in the business school.  I watched the dot-com bubble burst from the safety of the classroom, but those events sparked in me a love for technology that is a big reason why I am at Likewise today.”
– Luke D.

“10 years ago I was finishing my beta testing on Windows 2000 and AD in preparation to migrate many of my customers from Novell Netware 3 to AD.  I had already migrated our internal network, and was beginning to dive into the Exchange 2000 beta.  The power of AD’s Native Group Policy compared to even the upcoming ZENworks for Desktops 3 was a big deal for us in maintaining stability in our customers’ environments.”
– Rob A.

“10 years ago, I was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on integrating Windows 2000 Active Directory with MIT’s Athena distributed computing environment and on the MIT Kerberos team. The work spanned many areas, including populating AD from replicating MIT’s user accounts database, making AD authentication work using MIT’s pre-existing Kerberos infrastructure, and getting the AFS distributed file system working on Windows 2000.”
– Danilo A.

“Ten years ago I was a Technical Services Manager for a SMB VAR. We were casting the net far and wide during the dot com. “Convergence” was big and we were deploying Polycom video conferencing (H.320/H.323) with solutions from AdTran.  Microsoft Windows 2000 was just around the corner, and I was busy still trying to finish my MCSE 4.0.  Always exciting times in IT.”
– Bill S.

Finally, if any of you have memories to share, whether or not they include reference to Active Directory, please feel free to leave them in the comments.